Skyballs

Published

I was going to try to fit bone into the headline somehow…but with our recent conversations about 007 and his genitalia, but I thought this was more appropriate. Or inappropriate. That’s what you call diverse writing.

This was the first movie I’ve ever seen in a theater by myself. Well I wasn’t really by myself. I was surrounded by 200 elderly people hacking up their lung butter every time Bond was trying to make sexy lady moves. I couldn’t help but thing maybe that was why he wasn’t getting very lucky this time around.

Anyway, Skyfall is all about Bond and how he’s losing a step, becoming “old balls” if you will. After a near-death experience, Bond isn’t quite what he once was. He’s on edge, jittery. He’s lost his marksmanship, he’s lost as step physically and we find out that his upbringing was less than ideal, leading to some mommy/daddy issues.

Thankfully this is all just in time for homosexually-charged Javier Bardem to get a list of all the MI6 agents and starts pickin’ em off one by one. As if Bond didn’t have enough shit on his plate, he’s gotta deal with this now. At this point in the movie he’d only gotten laid once.

So basically I felt that two over-arching themes “pop, pop”ed out to me in this installment. The first was the old, “I’m getting too old for this shit” shit. I really had a hard time buying into this, since it seems like the series was rebooted to have Daniel Craig portray a younger Bond. We’re only three movies in for heaven sake and he’s already too old for this shit? I wonder at what point in the Roger Moore was getting to old for the shit. Maybe he never did. Although in Craig’s defense, the toughest thing Moore ever did on-screen was…look handsome? Nah, probably the clown thing.

The second theme I saw…well it’s hard to put a finger on. The film was basically trying to tell us what the James Bond franchise is all about. I watched the 60 Minutes interview with Craig the other day, and they asked him why the movies weren’t as campy and fun. He basically said that they had to earn that right. They literally leveled the franchise, because Die Another Day was so bad, that they had to start from scratch.

You can see in this movie, they slowly are starting to add the themes back in. Tastefully I might add. We have Q, but he doesn’t give him that much cool stuff, he’s merely introduced. We see a couple of one liners. While not the greatest, they still made me feel fuzzy. I smiled and felt apart of the movie as a Bond fan. There’s some other great moments that harken back to the days of Connery, but I won’t spoil too much.

Lastly, the thing that made this movie great was they reminded us that no one in Bond is irreplaceable. The reason the franchise has been able to survive for this long is because although actors may come and go, characters, positions, themes…all the reasons we keep coming back for more are still there. Bond is still Bond, and while Daniel Craig isn’t my favorite 007, he’s growing on me fast. At least he’s not emotionally stunted George Lazenby.